The Single Woman's Choice as a Zero-Sum Game

Abstract

Cultural scholars are paying increasing attention to the ways in which choice has become a cultural obligation deeply ingrained in neoliberal, post-feminist, therapeutic and consumerist norms. Drawing insights from this literature, this paper first charts the changing discourse on choice, and then goes on to both examine and challenge the centrality of the rhetoric of choice in contemporary discourses of singlehood and single women. In my analysis, the idea of choice is posited as a multivalent signifier dependent on changing social contexts and denoting shifting aspects of feminine subjectivity and personal relations. It is my aim thereby to problematize notions of choice and singlehood, as well as to question the cultural processes that produce them. To do so, I probe the discursive relations that produce distinctive clusters of meanings, as well as the tensions and contradictions that emerge around them. Such a reading emerges from a content-based analysis of readers' comments and responses to an online Internet column depicting the various advantages of being ‘single-by-choice’. The findings show that while choice can be a discursive force that enables single women to resist traditional family forms and establish their chosen subjectivities, the centrality of choice in the construction of intimate relations today also casts in doubt and paradoxically delegitimizes single women's option of autonomy and individuality. Some of the social interpretations of choice denote that single women are endowed with a partial and incomplete subjectivity, while according to other stances the choice of singlehood signifies a radical option for claiming singlehood as a long-term way of life. However, the aim of the critique proposed here is not merely to deconstruct the discursive mechanism that delegitimizes singlehood, but also to point out some of the potential limitations emerging from the new counter-discourse of chosen singlehood.

Keywords:

• choice
• singlehood
• neoliberalism
• culture
• post feminism
• subjectivity

Notes on contributor

Dr Kinneret Lahad is a feminist sociologist and an assistant professor at the NCJW Women and Gender Studies Program at Tel-Aviv University in Israel. Her primary research interests are the sociology of the family, feminist cultural studies, singlehood, sociology of time, popular culture and self-help culture. She is currently writing a book about the discursive formations of female singlehood and social time.

Notes

1 My working definition of singlehood throughout this study applies to women who are not engaged in a committed long-term relationship and do not have children. It is important to stress that I do not include in this research the social categories of single mothers, divorcees, widows or single women who are engaged in a long-term relationship.

2 According to a recent survey, it is the third most visited website in Israel. http://www.themarker.com/hitech/1.513836.

3 See also, Cohen and Neiger (2007).

4 For varying analyses and their critiques, see canonical studies by conducted by Ang (1985), Modleski (1982), Radway (1984) and for more recent ones see for example Ang (1997, 2003) Bobo (1995), Hermes (1995), Liebes and Elihu (1993), McRobbie (2000, 2004), Press (1991, 2006), Van Zoonen (1994), Wood and Beverly (2004), Wood (2009), Yang (2011).

5 The centrality of family ideology and relatively high birth-rates in Israel are perceived to be related to various factors, such as the ‘demographic war’ against Israel's enemies (both within and outside), the effects of the Holocaust, the role of the religious establishment in the political and cultural system, as well as the marriage of Zionist and traditional religious Jewish practices and beliefs aimed at enhancing the Jewish character of the state of Israel. See Portugese (1998).

6 See Budgeon (2010), Ferguson (2010), Gill (2007, 2008, 2011), Gonick (2006), Hoerl and Casey (2010), Lazar (2006, 2009, 2011), McRobbie (2004, 2011), McCarver (2011), Mendes (2012), Negra (2009), Probyn (1990, 1993), Tasker and Diane (2005).

7 The numbers here indicate the numbers of the comments in the order they appear below the column.